Posted on Tuesday, September 02 2003 @ 10:43 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck| ATI had two names for this technology from the beginning. One was Radeon 9900 PRO the only step left for this generation of cards, and the other the Radeon 9800XT.
From the very beginning, ATI decided to name the re-spin of the chip based on its performance. So it didn't feel it could call it the Radeon 9900 PRO if it wasn't acting as one. At last year's Computex, Gigabyte and ATI played with the Radeon 8500XT name, clocked at 300MHz rather than the standard 275MHz. So it's built on that concept. The Radeon 9800XT will end up at 425MHz+ for the chip and 700MHz for memory and there are likely to be DDR I and DDR II cards, it appears. 425MHz and more for a 0.15ยต (micron) chip seems like a real engineering challenge. Increasing the speed from 325MHz for R300 to 425MHz for R360 is also quite a challenge. |
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Source : The Inquirer